Mumbai police, media have failed Jyotirmoy Dey

New Delhi-based Tehelka
weekly news magazine has published a scathing
indictment of the police investigation into the 2011 killing of Mumbai
crime reporter Jyotirmoy
Dey--and of the Indian media's coverage of it. Beneath the allegations
and the rumors, we still don't know exactly why he was killed, while the
self-confessed mastermind is a fugitive from justice. Meanwhile, a second
journalist has been indicted for the crime on apparently flimsy evidence.

The plot thickens

On the face of it, Dey's death in June
2011 was a classic case of a veteran reporter executed for digging too
deeply into the subject he had covered exhaustively for 22 years: Mumbai's
criminal underbelly. But the investigation took an unexpected turn in November
when police arrested Jigna Vora, the 37-year-old deputy bureau chief of Indian
daily The Asian Age, claiming they
had "strong evidence" implicating her in the murder, local news reports said. She
denied wrongdoing, but more than three months later, she was indicted under
organized crime laws for conspiring with mafia boss Chhota Rajan to kill Dey
over a professional rivalry -- a charge which carries a possible death penalty,
according to the reports. Local journalists reported
that Dey may have been involved with a rival gang, even travelling to London to
share information about Rajan's activities with an exiled don. Suddenly, the
case didn't seem quite so straightforward.

CPJ spoke with several Indian press freedom advocates as the
investigation developed, but no one knew what to make of it. Had Dey been
sucked into the mob rivalry he claimed to cover objectively, as the media was
widely reporting? Had Jigna Vora really exchanged 36 phone calls with the
fugitive gangster Rajan in the days before Dey's murder, as police told local
media?

The mafia calling the
shots

Apparently not: Chhota Rajan himself planted both stories,
according to Tehelka. The fugitive,
who is wanted on multiple criminal counts, admitted to masterminding the hit on
Dey in calls made in person to a series of Hindi-language TV stations. These PR
exercises launched rumors about the journalist's underworld connections
overseas, which were supplemented by police interviews
about Dey's "mysterious tour" abroad -- which Tehelka says was a simple vacation. Yet police and reporters
accepted Rajan's analysis with very few exceptions.

Rajan also told TV channels that Jigna Vora "instigated" the
killing, according to Tehelka. Again,
his account was barely contested. One Hindi-language TV station refused to run
Rajan's comments on grounds they were malicious, Tehelka reports. Police commissioner Himanshu Roy, on the other
hand, repeated the story almost verbatim to The Times of Indiaas recently as last month: "There are transcripts of Rajan saying
that he regretted killing Dey and it happened because Jigna instigated
him."

The February 21 charge sheet against Vora ran to 1,400
pages, but did not list the 36 calls between Vora and Rajan that journalists
had unquestioningly reported. Only three calls were confirmed, all in reference
to an interview Rajan gave The Asian Age,
according to Tehelka. The
professional rivalry at the heart of the motive, meanwhile, appeared to be
based solely on conflicting stories the journalists had each penned on the same
topic in one week in May 2011. And the transcripts of Rajan implicating Vora? Tehelka published the relevant extract: "You
know that Jigna Vora...Jigna Vora used to say all the time that he (Dey) was in
touch with them (the rival Dawood gang)." Meanwhile Vora remains in custody
with deteriorating health, according to The Indian Express.

Let's be clear about the implications of this report: In Tehelka's analysis, the source for Dey's
and Vora's alleged underworld involvement is Dey's murderer. His account was
apparently unchallenged by the majority of their colleagues and the police. Rajan,
who is wanted by police for two decades, admitted to the crime on television,
yet his victim and a suspect he implicated became the focus of the
investigation.

The real truth?

Police officials and journalists have generated thousands of
pages between them, but they have all failed J Dey. Besides Jigna Vora, another
10 suspects are on trial, but the man behind it all remains at large. And
police have yet to discover whether it was Dey's reporting that put him at
risk.

Tehelka believes
police ignored two early leads: Dey was investigating Rajan's personal life,
and had caused the reassignment of a Mumbai police officer after alleging he
had links to organized crime.

Ruhi Khan, a U.K.-based journalist who has written about the
case for
CPJ, believes the Tehelka
investigation paints a credible case that Dey was targeted for his work -- or,
at the very least, that the police have not done due diligence in investigating
this angle. "The role of journalist Jigna Vora in Dey's murder was always
suspect," she told CPJ by email. "This report definitely raises some serious
doubts on the police theory."

Geeta Seshu, who condemned the Indian media's coverage of
Jigna Vora back in December on the media watchdog website The Hoot, agreed. "As to whether Dey
was targeted for his work, the police are simply not pursuing this course of
investigation," she told CPJ. "I'm still unclear why Dey was killed."

Madeline Earp is senior researcher for CPJ’s Asia Program. She has studied Mandarin in China and Taiwan, and graduated with a master’s in East Asian studies from Harvard. Follow her on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.